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They have been referred to as “Kim’s Mafia.” Kim Choong-Ki himself wouldn’t have put it that approach. Nevertheless it was true what semiconductor engineers in South Korea whispered about his former college students: They have been all over the place.
Beginning within the mid-Eighties, as chip manufacturing within the nation accelerated, engineers who had studied underneath Kim at
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) assumed prime posts within the {industry} in addition to coveted positions instructing or researching semiconductors at universities and authorities institutes. By the start of the twenty first century, South Korea had turn into a dominant energy within the international semiconductor market, assembly greater than 60 % of worldwide demand for reminiscence chips alone. All over the world, lots of Kim’s protégés have been lauded for his or her sensible success in remodeling the financial system of a nation that had simply began assembling radio units in 1959 and was fabricating outdated reminiscence chips within the early ’80s.
That success will be traced partly to Kim, now an emeritus professor at KAIST. Of common peak, with grey hair since his mid-30s, he was the primary professor in South Korea to systematically educate semiconductor engineering. From 1975, when the nation had barely begun producing its first transistors, to 2008, when he retired from instructing, Kim educated greater than 100 college students, successfully creating the primary two generations of South Korean semiconductor consultants.
The Samsung Welfare Basis acknowledged Kim’s affect when it
awarded him its prestigious Ho-Am Prize in 1993 for “constructing a strong basis for Korea’s semiconductor {industry}.” Since then, he has been revered within the South Korean media because the {industry}’s “godfather.” But even immediately, Kim stays largely unknown outdoors of South Korea’s chip group. Who, then, is that this inconspicuous semiconductor “Mafia” boss?
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Kim Choong-Ki was born in Seoul in 1942, when Korea was a colony of the Japanese Empire. His mom taught elementary college; his father, Kim Byung-Woon, was a textile engineer for
Kyungbang, Korea’s iconic producer of yarns and materials. The elder Kim had helped construct the corporate’s first spinning manufacturing facility, and his engineering savvy and consequent renown impressed his son. “He made a every day tour of the manufacturing facility,” the youthful Kim recollects. “He instructed me that he might detect which machines have been in bother and why, simply by listening to them.” Such classes planted the seed of an ethos that might drive Kim Choong-Ki’s profession—what he got here to name the “engineer’s thoughts.”
Rising up, Kim Choong-Ki was a mannequin South Korean scholar: bookish, obedient, and silent. Though his household pressed him to affix his father within the textile {industry}, he as an alternative selected to pursue electrical engineering. He studied at Seoul Nationwide College after which at Columbia College, in New York Metropolis, the place he earned his doctorate underneath
Edward S. Yang, a specialist in transistor concept. Shortly after, in the summertime of 1970, Fairchild Digicam and Instrument employed Kim to work in its analysis and improvement laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif.
Since World Struggle II, Fairchild Digicam had been the world’s main developer of imaging gear, together with radar cameras, radio compasses, and X-ray machines. In 1957, the corporate launched the division Fairchild Semiconductor to manufacture transistors and built-in circuits from silicon, then an progressive transfer, as most semiconductor gadgets on the time used germanium. The enterprise spawned dozens of merchandise, together with the primary silicon built-in circuit, thus fueling the rise of Silicon Valley. As a newcomer to Fairchild’s R&D lab, Kim was put to work on one in every of these new sorts of chips: the charge-coupled machine.
Simply the yr earlier than, in 1969, George E. Smith and Willard Boyle at Bell Laboratories
proposed the idea of the CCD, for which they’d later win a Nobel Prize. Nevertheless it was Kim and his colleagues at Fairchild who realized the primary CCD gadgets that advanced into business merchandise broadly utilized in digital pictures, radiography, and astronomy. Kim grew to become so proficient in CCD expertise that different engineers on the firm usually dropped by his workplace on the finish of the day to choose his mind. “Quickly they started to name me Professor CCD,” he remembers.
Amongst different innovations, Kim helped develop a
CCD area image sensor that greatly improved low-light detection and the primary two-phase CCD linear image sensor—which, he reported, assured “the benefit of use and the top quality of picture replica.” “Fairchild’s—or higher name them Choong-Ki’s—CCDs made potential the broad purposes in high-resolution cameras,” Columbia’s Yang says. With out these practical gadgets, he provides, “there could be no Nobel Prize for the CCD.”
Kim’s time at Fairchild reworked him as a lot because it did digital camera expertise. His education in South Korea and at Columbia had primarily emphasised e-book studying and concept. However his expertise at Fairchild solidified his perception, first impressed by his father, {that a} true “engineer’s thoughts” requires sensible talent as a lot as theoretical information. Along with performing experiments, he made a behavior of studying inner technical stories and memos that he discovered on the firm library, a few of which he later dropped at KAIST and used as instructing materials.
At Fairchild, Kim additionally realized the way to talk with and lead different engineers. When he began there, he was soft-spoken and introverted, however his mentors at Fairchild inspired him to precise himself confidently and clearly. Later, the transformed Kim would turn into the “loudest-speaking” professor at KAIST, in line with a number of fellow school members, they usually say his absence made the entire campus appear quiet.
Kim rose shortly inside Fairchild’s hierarchy. However simply 5 years into his tenure, he returned to South Korea. His beloved father had died, and, because the eldest son, he felt a heavy accountability to look after his widowed mom. Racial discrimination he skilled at Fairchild had additionally harm his satisfaction. Most essential, nevertheless, he had discovered a super place to work again residence.
Then referred to as KAIS (the “T” was added in 1981), Kim’s new employer was the primary science and expertise college in South Korea and stays one of the vital prestigious. The South Korean authorities had established the institute in 1971 with financing from the US Company for Worldwide Improvement and had invited
Frederick E. Terman, the legendary dean of Stanford College’s college of engineering and a “father” of Silicon Valley, to attract up the blueprint for its route. Terman burdened that KAIS ought to goal to “fulfill the wants of Korean {industry} and Korean industrial institutions for extremely educated and progressive specialists, reasonably than so as to add to the world’s retailer of fundamental information.” It was the right place for Kim to unfold his newfound philosophy of the “engineer’s thoughts.”
Kim’s laboratory at KAIS attracted scores of bold grasp’s and doctoral candidates from virtually the second he arrived within the spring of 1975. The first purpose for the lab’s reputation was apparent: South Korean college students have been hungry to find out about semiconductors. The federal government touted the significance of those gadgets, as did electronics corporations like GoldStar and Samsung, which wanted them to fabricate their radios, televisions, microwaves, and watches. However the {industry} had but to mass-produce its personal chips past fundamental built-in circuits comparable to CMOS watch chips, largely as a result of a scarcity of semiconductor specialists. For 20 years, till the mid-Nineteen Nineties, becoming a member of Kim’s lab was primarily the one approach for aspiring semiconductor engineers in South Korea to get hands-on coaching; KAIS was the one college within the nation that had ready lecturers and correct services, together with clear rooms for assembling high-quality chips.
Nevertheless it wasn’t KAIST’s digital monopoly on semiconductor coaching that made Kim a mentor with out peer. He launched a mode of instructing and of mastering engineering that was new to South Korea. As an example, his conviction that an “engineer’s thoughts” requires equal elements concept and software at first puzzled his college students, who regarded engineering as mainly a scholarly self-discipline. Though they have been proficient in arithmetic and nicely learn, most of them had by no means carried out any severe work in design and development.
Due to this fact, one of many first classes Kim taught his college students was the way to use their arms. Earlier than they launched into their very own initiatives, he put them to work cleansing the lab, repairing and upgrading gear, and monitoring down obligatory elements. On this approach, they realized the way to resolve issues for themselves and the way to improvise in conditions for which no textbook had ready them. Their view of what it means to be an engineer modified profoundly and completely. Lots of them confess they nonetheless repeat Kim’s dicta to today. For instance: “Don’t select the topics that others have already thrown into the trash can.” And: “Scientists take into account
why first, however we engineers should suppose how first.” And: “Flawed choice is best than sluggish choice.”
Kim’s former college students bear in mind him as form, humorous, nonauthoritarian, meticulous, and hardworking. However in addition they say he was strict and may very well be scorching tempered and even terrifying, particularly when he thought they have been being lazy or sloppy. Legend has it that a few of his college students entered the lab by way of a ladder from the rooftop to bypass Kim’s workplace. One in all his greatest grievances was when college students did not correctly steadiness concept and observe. “Make it your self; then we are going to begin a dialogue,” he scolded those that centered an excessive amount of on mental examine. Alternatively, he mentioned, “Why don’t you utilize one thing malleable throughout the exhausting nut in your neck?” as a reproach to those that spent an excessive amount of time constructing issues, implying that they need to additionally use their brains.
Kim influenced not solely his personal college students but in addition numerous others by way of his openness. He cooperated with and even shared laboratory house with different KAIST professors, and he favored to go to different departments and universities to offer seminars or just to achieve new concepts and views—conduct that was, and nonetheless is, very uncommon in South Korean tutorial tradition. In his autobiography,
Chin Dae-Je, who developed 16-megabit DRAM at Samsung in 1989 and later served as South Korea’s minister of knowledge and expertise, recounts searching for out Kim’s tutelage when Chin was a graduate scholar at Seoul Nationwide College within the mid-Nineteen Seventies. “There was an intense spirit of competitors” between SNU and KAIST, recollects Chin, whose alma matter labeled him a “downside scholar” for learning with a rival professor.
Kim’s collegiality prolonged past academia to {industry} and authorities . Within the early Eighties, throughout a sabbatical, he led semiconductor analysis and improvement on the government-funded
Korea Institute of Electronics Technology, which developed each 32-kilobit and 64-kilobit ROM underneath his directorship. His fashionable semiconductor workshops at KAIST impressed GoldStar (LG since 1995), Hyundai Electronics (Hynix since 2001), and Samsung to sponsor their very own coaching packages at KAIST within the Nineteen Nineties. Kim’s shut partnership with these corporations additionally helped launch different pioneering mostly-industry-funded initiatives at KAIST, together with the Middle for Excessive-Efficiency Built-in Programs and the Integrated-Circuit Design Education Center, each directed by Kim’s former scholar Kyung Chong-Min. And the semiconductor {industry}, in flip, benefited from the ever extra extremely educated workforce rising from Kim’s orbit.
Kim’s lab at KAIST advanced in parallel with the expansion of the semiconductor sector in South Korea, which will be divided into three intervals. Through the first interval, starting within the mid-Sixties, the federal government led the cost by enacting legal guidelines and drawing up plans for {industry} improvement, establishing analysis institutes, and urgent corporations and universities to pay extra consideration to semiconductor expertise. Samsung and different electronics corporations wouldn’t get severe about manufacturing semiconductor gadgets till the early Eighties. So when Kim began his lab, virtually a decade prior, he was coaching engineers to fulfill the {industry}’s
future wants.
His first group of scholars labored totally on the design and fabrication of semiconductors utilizing PMOS, NMOS, and CMOS applied sciences that, whereas not leading edge by international requirements, have been fairly superior for the South Korea of the time. As a result of there have been few {industry} jobs, many alumni of Kim’s lab took positions at authorities analysis institutes, the place they developed state-of-the-art experimental chips. An exception was Lim Hyung-Kyu, one in every of Kim’s first grasp’s candidates, whom Samsung despatched to review at KAIST in 1976. Lim would go on to guide the event of varied reminiscence gadgets at Samsung, most significantly NAND flash reminiscence within the Nineteen Nineties.
The second interval began in 1983, when Samsung declared that it could pursue semiconductors aggressively, beginning with DRAM. The transfer drove rival conglomerates comparable to Hyundai and GoldStar to do likewise. Consequently, the South Korean chip {industry} quickly expanded. KAIST and different universities supplied the mandatory manpower, and the federal government decreased its function. In Kim’s lab, college students started to discover rising applied sciences—together with polysilicon thin-film transistors (for LCD panels), infrared sensors (for army use), and fast thermal processing (which elevated effectivity and decreased prices of semiconductor manufacturing)—and printed their leads to prestigious worldwide journals.
KAIST graduates flocked to Samsung, GoldStar/LG, and Hyundai/Hynix. As authorities affect declined, some alums from the primary interval who had labored at authorities analysis institutes additionally took company jobs. On the identical time, increasingly more of Kim’s former college students accepted college professorships. After leaving Kim’s lab in 1991, as an example, Cho Byung-Jin spent 4 years growing DRAM and flash reminiscence at Hyundai earlier than changing into a star professor on the Nationwide College of Singapore and later at KAIST. Kyung Chong-Min, Kim’s first doctoral candidate, joined KAIST’s school in 1983; by the point he retired in 2018, Kyung had educated extra semiconductor specialists than Kim himself.
Through the third interval, from 2000 on, {industry} seized the helm of semiconductor improvement. Academia churned out extra specialists in addition to vital analysis, with minimal contribution from authorities. Alumni of Kim’s lab continued to guide semiconductor engineering, a few of them rising to turn into high-ranking executives. For instance,
Kwon Oh-Hyun, who obtained his grasp’s diploma from KAIST in 1977, served as CEO at Samsung Electronics for a lot of the 2010s, when the corporate dominated the world market in not solely reminiscence but in addition cellphones, TVs, and residential home equipment.
Different alums performed key roles in semiconductor analysis and improvement. Ha Yong-Min at LG Show mastered TFT-LCD and OLED screens for tablets, pocket book computer systems, and cellphones; Park Sung-Kye, generally referred to as the “treasure of Hynix,” developed a lot of the firm’s reminiscence merchandise. In academia, in the meantime, Kim had turn into a mannequin to emulate. Lots of his trainees adopted his strategies and ideas in instructing and mentoring their very own college students to turn into leaders within the discipline, making certain a gentle provide of extremely expert semiconductor engineers for generations to return.
Within the spring of 2007, lower than a yr earlier than Kim turned 65—the obligatory retirement age in South Korean academia—KAIST elected him as one in every of its first distinguished professors, thus extending his tenure for all times. In addition to the Ho-Am Prize, he has garnered quite a few different awards through the years, together with the Order of Civil Benefit for “excellent meritorious companies…within the curiosity of bettering residents’ welfare and selling nationwide improvement.” And in 2019, he was named a Particular person of Distinguished Service to Science and Know-how, one of many nation’s highest honors.
For younger semiconductor engineers in South Korea immediately, Kim Choong-Ki is a legend—the good unsung hero behind their nation’s ascendancy in chip manufacturing. However its dominance on the planet market is now underneath menace. Though South Korea has competed furiously with Taiwan in current a long time, its most formidable challenger sooner or later will doubtless be China, whose bold
Made in China 2025 plan prioritizes semiconductor improvement. Since 2000, the nation has been a serious importer of South Korean chips. However China’s current heavy funding in semiconductors and the provision of extremely educated Chinese language engineers—together with semiconductor specialists educated in the US, Japan, and South Korea—signifies that Chinese language semiconductor corporations might quickly turn into main international rivals.
Compounding the issue, the South Korean authorities has uncared for its function in supporting chip improvement within the twenty first century. Almost 50 years after Kim started educating its first semiconductor engineers, the {industry} once more faces a major workforce scarcity. Consultants estimate that
several thousand new engineering specialists are needed each year, however the nation produces just a few hundred. But regardless of corporations’ pleas for extra employees and universities’ requires insurance policies that advance tutorial training and analysis, the federal government has finished little.
Towards the tip of his profession, Kim had turn into involved with the constraints of the type of “engineer’s thoughts” that had taken root in South Korea. “The financial improvement of Korea was depending on reverse engineering and following superior international locations,” he mentioned in an interview in 1997. That fast-follower method, he added, relied on an academic system that taught college students “the way to learn maps”—to determine a identified product objective and plot a course for reaching it. “And who made the maps? Superior international locations.” He thus concluded, “We now have to vary our instructional coverage and educate our college students how to attract maps.”
Kim himself might not have absolutely realized this bold imaginative and prescient of cultivating a rustic of creative-minded engineers, able to pioneering really groundbreaking applied sciences that may safe his nation’s management on the world stage. However hopefully his successors have taken his recommendation to coronary heart. The way forward for South Korea is determined by it.
To learn extra, see “Transfer of ‘Engineer’s Mind’: Kim Choong-Ki and the Semiconductor Industry in South Korea,” Engineering Research 11:2 (2019), 83-108.
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